Tag: existentialism

I am on the train home and I haven’t even begun to think about how to tell my dad I had an existential crisis, quit my job and plan to coast around until I have only enough money to spoon beans into my arid mouth.

We stood up and measured ourselves against everything we could find. We measured the tips of our fingers to the points of our elbows and compared them to the panels in the wooden doors, lining them up precisely; edging palms up, straightening each ulna. We took the edges of each eye and we spun and spun until we knew exactly how many Mississippi’s it took eye to eye around the backs of our living minds. How tall are you compared to this fern? Here, let me place your finger in the crack of the wooden floorboard. It’s but a fingernail wide; the baby, that is. Where is your nose in relation to this light switch? We compared ourselves to the world and this we did every Sunday; Our only way to distinguish between life and death.

It’s frustrating. Like the reoccurring dream where I try to remove a garment and it snaps back on. Don’t you get it? I just want to remove my dungarees.

There are questions inside of questions. Tiny questions hiding inside big questions like why do I exist like this and should I eat less meat? I shout the questions to the abyss and nothing comes back. I am Zack Braff, Peter Sarsgaard and Natalie Portman. I am shouting in the rain in a bin bag, every day, inside myself. Yanking the dungarees, losing parts of myself.

And every day it’s total annihilation. Drunk and sad, and sex with married men and drugs and shrugging and 2am messages to the man who never, ever loved me. And I’m empty and I’m lost and I wish it were a game of hide and seek. I just want to be found.

The small cube in front of him was emitting a white light which bounced off his big glassy eyes. He sat there, gleefully, revelling in his own power. He had finally created this object of beauty.

He was the master of it.

It sparkled and it churned. Light poured out from every crack. It was everything he had ever wanted and more.

With barely a sound, suddenly the cube shut down. The light stopped emitting and the man was plunged into darkness. Frustrated, he stood up from his chair and stooped over the cube to examine it. He prodded it, still hunched over. How could it be broken already? He had spent years fine-tuning each circuit and current. He had laboured endlessly. He had broken the law.

There was a faint buzzing coming from within it. It grew fainter and fainter still until it was silent.

He leaned into it.

With an enormous serge of power and light, the cube opened up and engulfed the man. He was transported into a different place, but how or by what he did not know. With no physical body now, his mind existed in an endless and vast dark space. He could feel nothing. He was in limbo. The darkness continued perpetually. He was not sure how long this went on for. Time did not seem to exist. There was no linear occurrence. Each time he tried desperately to recollect his past life, it became a blur and he had no memory. He waded through the relentless fog of his mind. How had he come to deserve to exist in this way? What had he done to place him in this hell? These questions the man pondered over and over for eternity and beyond in total darkness.